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Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Making a pattern

Do you remember this little quilt? I made it about a year ago for a STASH challenge. Yesterday I decided I want to try to make one more piece for the green line show and thought I could expand on this idea. Fortunately I still have the Illustrator drawing I did for the small version. The new one will be bigger, so I enlarged the drawing to the size I want, printed it out on nine sheets of paper and taped it up on my front window.

The digital drawing is never exactly as I want it to be, so once I have it all taped together, I like to draw over it with a permanent marker and refine the line.

This is a very stylized tree, but I want it to have a very organic look, so I corrected some of the stiffer looking branches. I also tried to be sure that all the branches taper as they grow out from the tree and get fat where they branch out into new branches, as trees do in nature. I always notice when drawings or paintings of trees get these things wrong. Makes them look very clunky, even if they are intended to be non-realistic.

I left it hanging up all night and looked at it again this morning. Something a little out of balance there, in my opinion, so I rotated it slightly, taped some more paper to it and extended the branches.

Better, I think. I also decided that bottom, broken-thumb of a branch on the right has to go. It won't be there in the fabric version. I apparently decided the same thing when I made the small version. I had forgotten that until I found the photo to post here.

That is the full extent of anything useful I did today. Mostly I lounged around in my pajamas and slept. I have the crud—sore throat, full head and the worst are my ears, which are plugged, painful and I can hear my pulse thumping away in the right one. I'll call the Dr. if they still hurt like this tomorrow. So now, I'm off to bed. Hope I feel like cutting fabric tomorrow.